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Union ranks fall in labor fight states

Only 11.3 percent of workers belong to a union, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. | AP Photo

The entire drop-off can’t be credited to policy changes. In Ohio, where unions managed to repeal a 2011 law attacking a collective bargaining rights in a referendum, union membership rates fell from 14.7 percent to 13.9 percent. And deep blue Connecticut saw the biggest drop, from 17.7 percent to 15.1 percent.

But the overall picture is indisputable. Since the 1950s, when roughly one-third of workers belonged to a union, their ranks have steadily thinned. In 1935, when then President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, 13.2 percent of workers belonged to a union, according to the Associated Press.

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“Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “Union membership impacts every other economic outcome that matters to all workers – falling wages, rising health care costs, home foreclosures, the loss of manufacturing jobs and disappearing retirement benefits. … But our still-struggling economy, weak laws and political as well as ideological assaults have taken a toll on union membership, and in the process have also imperiled economic security and good, middle class jobs.”

Overall, unionized workers had median weekly earnings of $943, compared to $742 for non-union workers. Union workers also tended to be older than their non-union counterparts, with 14.9 percent of workers 55 to 64 belonging to a union, compared to only 4.2 percent for workers 16 to 24.

Bloomingdale said she hoped union membership could turn around in the future as organizers target new workers, including retail and fast-food employees. Harris said there have been recent successes in Indiana organizing service-sector workers at two Indianapolis colleges: Butler University and Marian University. Trumka has similar hopes.

“We enter 2013 with our eyes open and understand that these challenges offer real opportunities for working people to reshape the future,” he said. “Working families are building community alliances, engaging with young workers and immigrants, fighting right-wing politicians and organizing in innovative ways. From taxi workers to teachers to nurses to Wal-Mart workers to port workers to freelance writers, working Americans are committed to building a new movement for the future and to creating good jobs and an economy that works for all.”